His post goes into a bit more detail (and explains what #firstworldproblems signifies), but here are the key lines of Cole’s analysis:

I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. …

… people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. … the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is–quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

Quite so. The approach that twitterers using #firstworldproblems take to the developing world mirrors, in no small part, the approach Europeans (and later, Americans) took to the “new” worlds of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. To assume that no one in Lagos is frustrated with her iPad’s inability to sync properly is to assume that Lagos exists in a different stage of history, a different time – pace Gibson, “[t]he future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” But listening to Cole, it seems the future is actually very well distributed – at least geographically; in our brave new world, wealth forms more of a barrier than oceans.2

The key difference in both usages is history, represented by technological gadgetry (and sometimes infrastructural abundance). Time passed, in this view, is progress achieved — a view echoed, from another vantage point, in a related meme-driven complaint about the lack of flying cars. In this, as in so many ways, our way of seeing the world is an iron Enlightened Victorian imperialist cage, albeit one with some of the sharp edges sanded off.

Or, Ain’t No Party Like a Synchronized Bird Release Party

Some folks make it look easy, but really, international commerce can be a lot of work – and mightily dull at the same time (all those currency conversions, ugh!). But let it never be said that China traders didn’t know a good time when it flew at them in a panic.

While doing business at Canton and Macau during the 1786/1787 trading season, Major Samuel Shaw – revolutionary hero, pioneer merchant in the China trade, and official U.S. Consul – took some time out to party.

A circumstance that occurred at the entertainment given us by the Portuguese ought not to be omitted. The dessert, which was very elegant, was prepared in a room adjoining that in which we dined, and the tables were ornamented with representations, in paper painted and gilt, of castles, pagodas, and other Chinese edifices, in each of which were confined small birds. The first toast was Liberty! and in an instant, the doors of the paper prisons being set open, the little captives were released, and, flying about us in every direction, seemed to enjoy the blessing which had just been conferred upon them.

How’s that for an evening’s entertainment? This flighty soirée comes up in Shaw’s posthumous memoir-cum-biography, as a footnote in a section kvetching about how the English merchants being, well, bitchy. They hadn’t invited Shaw or any other Americans to dinner, you see, and that was breaking some serious social coding (a breach of, cough, cough, food diplomacy, if you will – though I suspect in this case “food” meant “copious amounts of Madeira and/or rum”):

On [the English’s] arrival at Canton from Macao, the usual visits were made to them by us, and by them returned; and while every other nation paid us the customary civility of giving and receiving a dinner and supper, the English alone omitted that attention, not only to us individually, but to the Americans generally.

Shaw was an old hand at the casual snub, and beyond that, a professional – and so he assures his reader that such bad behavior “did not prevent or interrupt that intercourse which will ever exist among gentlemen.” Ahem.

In classic Early American style, though, he adds a final note of paranoia, suggesting that the lack of keggers was an order from on high:

It is true, that the Court of Directors [the governing body of the English East India Company], in their instructions to the supercargoes…enjoined it upon them to use every endeavor to prevent the subjects of Great Britain from assisting or encouraging in any shape the American commerce ; but if this prohibition was intended by the directors, or construed by their servants, to extend to the civilities heretofore paid the Americans, it cannot be denied that such conduct was extremely illiberal.

Illiberal indeed. Given the weight that Shaw and his compatriots back home gave to the treatment of Americans abroad, such behavior probably only confirmed their worst suspicions about Britons’ incorrigible arrogance.

But at least the Portuguese had the courtesy to stockpile pigeons, right?

Or, Some Links to Stuff I’m Excited About

The Exchange, with the delightfully old-school subtitle of “The Business History Conference Weblog,” offers a more-or-less daily posts describing items of interest to business historians and others of their ilk.

If you haven’t already, it’s well worth adding to your rss feeds; no one else is as up-to-date on the scholarship and happenings in the field.

Recently they’ve introduced me to a bunch of neat things, to wit:

Steven Mihm’s new project over at Bloomberg.com, Echoes, which connects current economic news to the past

“Railroads and the Making of Modern America” a digital history site at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, which “seeks to document and represent the rapid and far-reaching social effects of railroads and to explore the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century”

Finally – though you’ll pardon me for mentioning what is likely old news to any reader of this blog – the folks over at Digital Humanities Now have re-grouped and re-vamped that aggregation as a Press Forward publication with a multiplicity of feeds to meet the needs of every infonaut / digital humanist. See this post by CHNM’s Dan Cohen for a more lucid (and accurate!) explanation of how the new edition works.

Or, A Little Presentism Goes a Long Way

Historians like to think that even as we study the past, we’re doing something new. Bringing fresh light to unexplored recesses, listening, patiently, to quiet, pained voices – or, more aggressively, stripping away the accumulated decades-deep varnish of myths and flipping the table on complacent “just-so” stories about how we got into our present mess. And so on.

I’m no different. Part of the sales pitch for my own work (Hellloooo future employers and funders!) is that early American trade with Asia is understudied – and so, by examining at its sources we can not only learn more about the trade itself, but also overturn long-standing debates in “wider” fields (e.g. American early republic or antebellum history). This is should be a familiar tune to all of you, I’ve sung it enough…

But history, in its modern incarnation, is not a new field; these habits are old. Even (or perhaps especially) when it comes to studying early American trade with Asia.

Allow me to illustrate. In 1937, in his monumental study of the Jackson and Lee merchant families Ken Porter complains, at length, that the American China trade is too well known , romanticized, even – and that the trend in the extant literature is to obscure an equally important topic: U.S. trade with British India.*

It was the trade with the Far East which gave early American commerce its characteristic flavor, but although the early history of the China trade has been told and retold, the story of the trade with Calcutta and other ports in India remains un-recounted either in scholarly or popular form. [emphasis mine]
…
The very simplicity of the Canton trade, emphasized by the exotic and fantastic characteristics of its physical background, has made it a favorite theme for writers on American foreign trade. Far otherwise was the situation at Calcutta, a British port, where the lack of any such rigid monopoly as the co-hong or any exclusive policy toward foreigners, coupled with the undeveloped character of native industry, rendered the trade situation almost infinitely more complex. This complexity, which calls for a thorough analysis, has instead produced the effect of repelling investigators, who found in the background of Calcutta trade no such compensatory romantic elements as were furnished by the forbidden world of China. Anecdotes of Houqua, the great hong merchant, abound; but who has more than the name of his millionaire Caclutta contemporary, Ram Duloll Day? [Ramdulal Dey]
~Porter, Jacksons and the Lees, I:28, 52

And, for what it’s worth, Porter was right: at the time he was writing, the U.S. public and scholarly community had been inundated, for at least thirty years, with wistful remembrances, detailed annals, and historical examinations of the American China trade.** That itself was a retread: the China trade, and it’s romantic clippers and secret hongs and smuggling, was celebrated well in to the Gilded Age in travelogues, stories, poetry, and images. Indeed, Porter’s own work was part of a new resurgence of interest in the early history of US-Asia relations, prompted, in all likelihood, by near-term threats to American interests in the Pacific (<cough>WWII</cough>).

Alas, all this kvetching was for naught; not until our own fallen times has U.S. trade with India (as well as China) come under proper consideration (though muchgood work is being done now).

Even among professionals, our historical memory is only the length of a lifetime, if that – and so trends cycle, if not predictably so. This is true, I suspect, in all sub-fields, but certainly in early American history, where once again innovative work is being done by adopting perspectives that echo (at least superficially) those of earlier generations, though hopefully with the benefits that the treadmill of time has provided us.***

But part of that innovation is also a calculated forgetting. Speaking for myself, it would be impossible to write anything new, if I felt obligated to fully represent every quantum of prior work equally in my own scholarship — the accumulated weight of the dust alone would crush me.

Turns out that the the dead hand of the (professional study of the) past is just as easily shrugged off as the past itself; even necessarily so, I think. History, no less than the earth, belongs in usufruct to the living – though perhaps we would do well to be better stewards of it than we’ve been with the land.****

**To give but a brief taste of the recent (c. 30 years) lit that Porter might have been frustrated with:

John Watson Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903); Frank Erastus Hinckley, American Consular Jurisdiction in the Orient (Washington, D.C: W.H. Loudermilk, 1906); Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1910); Charles O. Paullin, “Early Voyages of American Naval Vessels to the Orient,” Proceedings 36, no. 2, United States Naval Institute (USNI) (June 1910): 428-463; Robert Ephraim Peabody, Merchant Venturers of Old Salem; a History of the Commercial Voyages of a New England Family to the Indies and Elsewhere in the XVIII Century, (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912); Robert Glass Cleland, “Asiatic Trade and the American Occupation of the Pacific Coast,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1914 I (1916): 283-289; Thomas Franklin Waters, Augustine Heard and His Friends, Ipswich Historical Society publications no. 21 (Salem, Mass.: The Society, 1916); Frederic William Howay, “The Fur Trade in Northwestern Development,” ed. H. M Stevens and Herbert E Bolton, The Pacific Ocean in History (New York, 1917), 276-86; Kenneth Scott Latourette, The History of Early Relations Between the United States and China, 1784-1844, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 22 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1917), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521723; State Street Trust Company, Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston; Being More Information About the Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston Who Played Such an Important Part in Building up the Commerce of New England, Together with Some Quaint and Curious Stories of the Sea (Boston, Mass: Walton Advertising and Printing Company: Printed for the State Street Trust Company, 1919); James Christy Bell, Jr., Opening a Highway to the Pacific, 1838-1846 (New York: Columbia University, 1921), http://books.google.com/books?id=uPRYAAAAMAAJ; Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: a critical study of the policy of the United States with reference to China, Japan, and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860, 1st ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922); Shü-lun Pan, “The trade of the United States with China” (Ph.D. diss., New York: Columbia University, 1924); Charles H Barnard et al., The Sea, the Ship and the Sailor; Tales of Adventure from Log Books and Original Narratives (Salem, Mass: Marine Research Society, 1925); Sydney Greenbie and Marjorie Latta Barstow Greenbie, Gold of Ophir; or, The Lure That Made America (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925); George Granville Putnam, Salem Vessels and Their Voyages, III (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1925); Robert Ephraim Peabody, The Log of the Grand Turks (Boston ;New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926); Charles Frederick Remer, The Foreign Trade of China (Shanghai, China: The Commercial Press, Limited, 1926); Kenneth Scott Latourette, “Voyages of American Ships to China, 1784-1844,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 28 (1927), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521723; Samuel Eliot Morison, “The India Ventures of Fisher Ames, 1794-1804,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 37 (April 1927): 14-23; George H Danton, The Culture Contacts of the United States and China; the Earliest Sino-American Culture Contacts, 1784-1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); “Perkins and Company, Canton 1803-1827,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 6, no. 2 (March 1, 1932): 1-5; Basil Lubbock, The Opium Clippers (Boston: Charles E. Lauriat company, 1933); E. H. Pritchard, “The Struggle for Control of the China Trade during the Eighteenth Century,” The Pacific Historical Review 3, no. 3 (September 1934): 280-295; Eliot Grinnell Mears, Maritime Trade of Western United States,, Stanford business series (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1935); Chen Ching-Jen, “Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations,” The Chinese Social and Political Science Review 19 (October 1935): 386-437; Amy Christine Carlson, “References to China in American Juvenile Periodicals During the Days of the Old China Trade, 1784-1844.”, 1936

And so on.

***I was having a conversation with a colleague just today about how it’s time to take the doughfaces seriously again! This is an ancient heresy of the worst kind, I tell you.